Core Emulation Features

  • Supports Game Boy (DMG), Game Boy Pocket and Light (MGB), Game Boy Color (CGB) and GBC-Mode Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Player (AGB) emulation
  • Supports accurate high level emulation of Super Game Boy (SGB; NTSC and PAL) and Super Game Boy 2 (SGB2)
  • High quality 96KHz audio
  • Battery save support
  • Save states
    • Follows the BESS specification for cross-compatibility with other emulators
  • Includes open source boot ROMs for all emulated models:
    • Complete support for all game-specific palettes in the CGB/AGB boot ROM, for accurate emulation of Game Boy games on a Game Boy Color
    • Supports manual palette selection with key combinations, with 4 additional new palettes (A + B + direction)

  • Six settings of color correction with adjustable ambient light temperature
  • Three audio high-pass filter modes
  • Real time clock emulation
  • Local link cable and infra-red emulation1
  • Game Boy Camera emulation2
  • Game Boy Printer emulation3
  • Workboy emulation1
  • Turbo, rewind and slow-motion modes
  • Cheat support
  • Cheat searching 1
  • Rumble support, including in games that are not rumble-enabled
  • Integrated, highly-compatible GBS player1
  • Emulation of the integrated alarm in HuC-3 games3 and support for motion-controlled games

Accuracy

  • SameBoy’s core is extremely high accuracy-focused, with each new version of SameBoy emulating more newly discovered edge cases
  • Emulates the differences between different hardware revisions, allowing the user to switch between them
  • Completely passes many test ROM suites, including all of mooneye-gb’s test suite, Wilbert Pol’s tests and blargg’s test ROMs
  • Sample-accurate sound emulation, downsampled from 2MHz, and accurate emulation of the PCM12 and PCM34 registers
  • T-cycle accurate emulation of LCD timing effects, allowing pixel-perfect emulation of the Demotronic trick, Prehistorik Man, GBVideoPlayer and other tech demos
  • Regularly tested against a suite of almost 2800 games via automatic testing, with a success rate of over 99.9% on both DMG and CGB games
  • Two optional frame blending modes4
  • Optional realistic emulation of audio interference

User Interface

  • Retina and High DPI display support, allowing a wider range of scaling factors without artifacts
  • Several scaling algorithms4 (Including exclusive algorithms such as OmniScale) and filters
    • The OmniScale algorithms let you play games in 1080p, 4K and 5K resolutions!
  • Customizable controls
  • Joypad support
  • Fullscreen support, optionally keeping aspect ratio
  • Optional speed-run-friendly OSD
  • Control motion games using a joypad’s gyro controls, joystick, or your mouse
  • File browser integration; icons of Game Boy ROMs will feature in-game screenshots5

These features are currently exclusive to the macOS Cocoa frontend

  • Native Cocoa interface, with support for all system-wide features, such as drag-and-drop and smart titlebars
  • Use the Zoom button to resize to the next integer ratio
  • Optional update checker and installer
  • Have multiple saves by creating new Cartridge Instances
  • A theme editor for customizable Game Boy palettes6

Debugging

  • Advanced text-based debugger: (Learn more)
    • Traditional step/next/continue/finish flow control
    • Expression evaluator with assignment support, register and memory access, and symbol support
    • Disassembler with symbol support
    • Multiple conditional breakpoints, including jump-to breakpoints
    • Multiple conditional watchpoints
    • Call stack tracing
    • Tick counting
    • Back-stepping, in addition to single-step undo
    • Cartridge and MBC information
    • Accurate APU and PPU information
  • Memory viewer and editor1
  • Video RAM viewer1

  1. Only in the Cocoa macOS frontend ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  2. Only in the Cocoa macOS and iOS frontends; graphical noise is used instead of camera input in the SDL version ↩

  3. Only in the Cocoa macOS and iOS frontends ↩ ↩2

  4. Requires OpenGL 3.2 or Metal support ↩ ↩2

  5. Requires macOS (Quick Look) or an Open Desktop system (XDG Thumbnails) ↩

  6. Also available on iOS; themes can be exported to all frontends ↩